What is BI?
Several years ago, while I was coauthoring Business Intelligence: Making Better Decisions Faster (Microsoft Press, 2002), I was surprised by how strongly my peers disagreed about which technologies should be considered within the domain of BI and thus within the scope of the book. It was an enlightening experience to hear such divergent opinions among BI professionals about which tools they considered BI tools and which they excluded. This difference of opinion still exists within the IT industry, and many continue to debate the definition of BI. To me, BI is as much about business process as it is about technology, so I start defining BI from that perspective.
As a business process, BI is a series of activities you perform to gather and analyze data so that you can make better decisions and improve your business by sharing the results of your analysis with others. Whether you need information to decide how to make your daily routine more efficient or to support long-range planning, such as next year's budget, the steps you take to find, transfer, format and study the data are all part of BI. In addition, BI includes the processes you use to make your results available for later reference so you and others can measure the impact of the decisions you made after studying the data. Typically, BI is an iterative process. You analyze the data to see what has happened, you take action to ensure good things keep happening and bad things stop, and you then analyze the data at a later point to determine whether your actions made things better or worse and whether external factors helped or hindered your efforts.
Given this broad definition of BI, you're using BI even when you're jotting down bits of information or creating lists to help you make decisions throughout the day. Introducing technology into some or all of the business processes you use to gather, analyze and share information can make these processes more efficient. Organizations tend to start small when adopting BI technology, often using it at first to solve specific problems. Over time, the use of BI technology grows incrementally as the emphasis shifts to disseminating information efficiently across the organization. As its BI strategy continues to mature, the organization usually acquires more sophisticated tools to enable greater interaction with and exploration of data.

Report Server entire reports in Report Viewer

Now technology made it easy to view all reports of different servers into a single application.



Server credentials read entire report structure to view reports.
The recursive loop reads nth report.
Report Parts and Data Source are resctricted to no be soon in tree view.

MDX (Multidimensional Expressions)

It’s similar to SQL for relational databases.
MDX can navigate multidimensional data and return data in more than two dimensions.
MDX allows to,

• Query multidimensional data
• Build dimensions and cubes
• Create calculated members
• Define security restrictions
  

And more…
SQL queries can return data in two dimensions only whereas MDX queries can return data in more than two dimensions called a cellset.
Cellsets are typically flattened into two dimensions for display but an intersection of the various dimensions to the value. E.g. three dimensional cube.

Analysis Services and EXCEL 2010 for Business Analysis

Microsoft office riched Office Excel 2010 for analytical purpose.
Using Sparkline, Slicers, Conditional formating made dashboards much faster and attractive.

Easy to establish connection with SSAS 2008 over HTTP.
See link to configure your SSAS 2008 over HTTP,
http://ghufrangreat.blogspot.com/2010/07/configuring-http-access-to-sql-server.html


Connection Establishment and Step to be followed:

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Connection is established, just click and use cube measures and dimensions.
Pretty cool reports and dashboards if you have well designed cube.


Now this file can be shared with any one. Data > Refresh All will refresh the data.

Thanks.

Configuring HTTP Access to SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services on Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Now its easy to connect with SSAS2008 over HTTP.
See the following link,https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492140.aspx
This is an easy way to connect either using C#.NET or EXCEL 2010.


Summary: This link is intended for anyone who is interested in providing access to SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services through HTTP protocol.The link explains the steps required to set up HTTP access and discusses different performance and security settings. All the instructions in this paper are specific to the Microsoft Windows® Server™ 2008 operating system.

Thanks

What is Business Intelligence and Data warehouse

• Business Intelligence is the process of turning data into information so business can make better decision.
• BI is an extension of data warehousing.
• BI often involves in consolidating data from different data source.
• A single BI solution can often deliver data to a wide variety of users throughout an organization.
• DW is the process of taking data from one or more sources and consolidating it.
• Once the data is in warehouse, a variety of tools can be used to view and analyze the data.
• DM (data mining) is a process of using statistical algorithms.

• Identity relationship between data elements

  Forecast future performance

  Find trends in data